Sep. 12, 2014

Keeping an Eye on Eruptions Around the World

While volcanic activity in Iceland, Papua New Guinea, and Hawaii may have caught the public’s attention in recent weeks, such phenomena aren’t that unusual. In fact, there may be as many as 75 volcanoes erupting on land every year, and thousands more on the seafloor. Geophysicist Cynthia Ebinger and Elizabeth Cottrell, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program, talk about the world’s volcanoes and what’s known about the processes that drive them, deep beneath the planet’s surface.